As you’ve read here before, the building I now work in for my contractor position is the building I used to work in when I worked for the Bank. I only officially worked in that building for about a year but the whole time I worked for the Bank I was only a stone’s throw from that building and was in and out of it all the time.
That building was the first time I ever had an office all to myself and it was an office with four walls that went all the way to the ceiling and a door! Can you imagine? It was in that building that my department finally gave me a raise and some respect. They were afraid I was going to leave even after the Bank was bought by a bigger Bank and they laid me off. As it turns out, sometimes when the bigger Bank lays people off they don’t really mean it because that’s when I was asked to stay and got a raise and then moved into my own office.
But, working for the bigger Bank wasn’t really my cup of tea. In retrospect, I don’t know if that’s because so much of my time was spent flying to Charlotte and working there or if I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that my department was going to ultimately survive the merger. I’m sure I could have moved to Charlotte and would probably still be working for the bigger Bank but I didn’t want to move and I really didn’t know if I wanted to work for a company that had 60,000 employees.
So, I talked to my manager and posted my resume. In two weeks I was gone. That was back in 1998. So what gives with all these trips down memory lane? Because I’m in the old building and there’s still all this stuff that I know the bigger Bank abandoned when they shut down that building. There are really nice cubes on the Vault Level of the building that I know were left by the Bank. There are doors laying on the floor–ready for a trip to the trash bin–that say Signet Private Banking. There are still property tags on file cabinets. The carpet is the same. The wallpaper is the same and the voice on the elevator is the same. To top it all off the bank branch across the street has paintings that came out of my Bank’s building.
It all adds up to “I wonder what could have been” and I hate that game of “what if”.